to ask what it is that makes someone feel that they are the wrong gender?

[Imogencodpiece]

I have just been watching the programme Ladyboys and I am genuinely interested in how someone knows they are the wrong gender.

A lot of the girls on the programme have said that they just knew they were mentally a woman and I am curious as to what makes one mentally a woman or indeed a man, surely our thoughts are gender neutral? Unless they are being stereotypical i.e a woman likes clothes and makeup and a man likes beer and football.

Can anyone try and explain perhaps?

Thoughts aren't gender neutral at all, why do you believe that

I think you're overthinking it.

They feel/know that they have been born into the wrong sex body.

Good enough explanation for me.

Because not all females like clothes and makeup and not all men like beer and football, this does not mean they want to be the opposite gender.

I myself do and like many things that would be viewed as stereotypically male, but I don't feel like I am meant to be male.

i would imagine it's the same thing that tells you, you are the right gender. feeling wrong is enough to know that you feel wrong.

I do have a tendency to overthink things saucyjack yes. Im just curious how they know.

I don't know how we could ever know if thoughts were gender neutral.

I have often felt incredibly frustrated by the way other people seem to think I should think, or feel, or behave, because they don't see it as being 'feminine'. And then I feel acutely conscious of my body in a way I don't usually, and I don't feel comfortable with. But I don't want to change gender because personally, I believe gender is a construct.

I get that it matters to analyse and reflect on these things because they're important, and they relate to how we see gender and sex and identity. But I don't know whether it is always important to try to rationalise someone else's feelings. If someone feels awful about their body - for reasons I might not understand at all - I can accept that without feeling I need to judge their reasons.

I think it must be a feeling which is unrelated to gender.

Stacks of people don't think/feel like their gender, yet don't want to be the other sex. Not adhering to stereotypical ideas about feminine/masculine doesn't make you the opposite sex. It must be a feeling unrelated to this otherwise it doesn't make sense.

very well put LRD

I would guess that if you are born as the "right" gender than it's impossible to imagine.

What does it feel like to be female? I don't notice feeling female, it doesn't feel like anything. I don't feel as if I am the right gender, it doesn't occur to me. But that doesn't mean that the "feeling" of being the wrong gender doesn't exist. It just means that you can only feel it is it is wrong.

Most of the muscles in my body, I don't feel them at all consciously unless I do something unexpected and they start to feel wrong.

What does it feel like to be human? It doesn't feel like anything, because you've never known any different.

I imagine it is a "wrongness" which is rather difficult to describe to people who don't feel it.

It doesn't have anything to do with shoes and makeup I'm sure.

I think it's a psychological feeling of 'wrongness' - an inability to be comfortable in your own skin.

I don't believe, personally, that anybody actually is born the wrong sex. We are all born as we are meant to be imo. I think it's a perception that something isn't right rather than a reality.

I wondered about that nice.

It could also be different people reacting differently, I think?

Like - not a good parallel I know - but we all know someone who is deeply unhappy with their body, but would never consider surgery, while others do have surgery. I think the whole thing is difficult to understand. I think understanding is less important than considering other issues like how to change society so no-one feels like this any more. Pipe dream, I know.

Why aren't thoughts gender neutral? Don't get it.

oops, massive X post.
don't they mean they are obsessed with feeling like their skin doesn't fit? Looking at their bits and feeling like those bits are wrong?

But then how does that vary from body dysmorphism where someone takes great offence against their own leg or nose? So must be more a case of wanting to interact with the world in a very different way.

I'm glad I wasn't borna bloke but I'm sure I would have coped fine if I had been.

There is actually part of the brain (can't remember the exact bit) which is different sizes in men and women. upon dissecting the brains of male- female transsexuals it was actually found that they had the "female brain" and visa versa with the female- male transsexuals. so in a way they literally have a female brain in a male body.

there is a really interesting documentary about a set of twin boys where one was raised as a girl after a horrible accident left his genitals completely mutilated when he was a baby. He was raised as a girl and when he/she hit adulthood he/she had a sex change back into a boy, married a women and had children but sadly ended up committing suicide.

Google David Reimer (born Bruce Reimer)

www.christian.org.uk/news/failed-experiment-boy-raised-as-girl-dies-in-tragic-suicide/

article link, but documentary is better.

How would we know if they were or weren't, lijkk?

1. We only know our own thoughts (assuming that's true and excluding psychological ramblings). So we can only associate them with the gender we are or feel we are, or with a lack of gender if we feel that way.

2. If we accept thoughts aren't gender neutral, it would be impossible to tell whether that's the product of nature or nurture, or what combinations thereof, in large part because language is not gender neutral and we express thought in language.

I suspect our brains are innately gender-neutral, btw, I just don't think we can currently prove it.

• should say our minds, not our brains.

charley, is that the child who was basically tortured by his doctor? It gave me the shudders reading that.

Disclaimer: did not proof read the link, just realised the source is Christian news website. Sorry if it expresses any offensive views. I did not proof read it before posting, which I now realise I should have done.

Well gender is an artificial construct to do with stereotypes around "masculine" and "feminine".

Most people will have personality traits / things that they enjoy which will fit into the "wrong" box for their proscribed gender. Enforced adherence to gender roles causes a lot of trouble and upset all over the world.

That aside, I think the point it that no-one can really know what their thoughts are as compared to someone else's. There's no way of knowing. Most likely is rather than thoughts being gendered, they are pretty much individual.

Although clearly if I am watching an ad with a woman admiring her lovely smooth legs and I think ooh I need to buy some razors to shave my legs then that is a gendered thought brought about by viewing a gendered ad.

Or something

It some instances it can be also be linked to autism. You can get girls with Aspergers syndrome who prefer systemising (a predominantly male characteristic) to emphasising (a predominantly female characteristic) and who may not behave in stereotypically 'female' way.

A female with Aspergers can feel like a misfit in the female world but that doesn't mean she is the wrong gender - although it could feel like that at times. I don't know if men also feel that way.

I agree with SaucyJack.

I don't think you can know unless you experience it.

They tried to circumcise him, for some reason they used a lazer and they screwed up the procedure so badly he was left with basically nothing, I guess a ken doll kind of situation. so they said "what we can do is raise him as a boy with no penis, or using hormone injections and some surgery raise him as a girl" I guess they thought it'd be better to raise him as a girl fully than as a boy with no penis opening him up to ridicule. Obviously there was not much research at the time on issues like this so they probably thought they were doing the right thing and the baby would never know the difference. Very sad all round though, I can't imagine what that poor child went through, feeling like your put together all wrong for as long as you can remember.

I believe the autism link is largely put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues.

Since he began working, as I understand it, people have got much better at diagnosing autism in girls, which was really dodgy when he started his work.

His stuff makes me feel furious.

charley - this link has some info. forbiddentopic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/profile-of-pedophile.html

I don't think it is sensible to use this case as any kind of model, given the accusations of sexual abuse by the doctor.

And obviously, a 'ken doll' situation isn't a vagina.

It is sickening that anyone ever thought that a lack of sexual function that might look like the absence of a penis, was somehow equivalent to a vagina. It isn't.

I think that "liking things that girls like" or "being empathetic" are unlikely to be enough to make any sensible person feel that they are the wrong gender. It's more likely to make them think that the norms around gendered behaviour are unnecessarily divisive.

Therefore I will continue to assume that people who say that they feel that they are the wrong gender are not lying, and not stupid, but are feeling something that I cannot understand because I have never felt it.

(If it is true that there is an innate gender difference in empathy or systemising or any of that stuff, the difference would be smaller than the difference in height between men and women. That means that there would be many many men who are empathetic and many many women who are "systemisers", just as there are plenty of men who are 5'4, or women who are 5'10.)